


just wanna feel something again

by plinys



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Beach House Verse, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 09:30:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11377395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: He kisses her in the kitchen, slow and sure, and it’s a start.





	just wanna feel something again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JackEPeace](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackEPeace/gifts).



> It's Jackie's birthday! So I wrote a thing?? Set in beach house verse because it's her favorite, and sometimes I guess we can have soft things for this ship.

It takes them a while to get here. Things are slow and messy and they’re still figuring themselves out. Who they are? What they are? Where they go from here?

He kisses her in the kitchen, slow and sure, and it’s a start.

It’s a beginning.

Their second.

Their real one.

They sleep in the same bed, at first to fight off the nightmares, and then because it’s comfortable. Because waking up with her in his arms feels right. Because the thought of not waking up beside her leaves a hollow feeling in his chest.

She tells him she loves him. Free and open, as only she can, as only she knows how.

He doesn’t tell her that loving isn’t easy. That loving takes time. That one day he’ll be ready to say it. That today is not that day.

He says, “It’s complicated.”

And she rolls her eyes insisting that she hates those words.

It’s progress.

A slow build of two people back together, here at the beach house, away from the rest of the world, in a place that only belongs to them.

It’s peaceful and easy, and yet, he can’t help himself from wanting more.

From taking long showers alone, his hand on himself, choking out her name into the curve of his arm so that it can’t be heard over the rush of the way.

From waking up the middle of the night, and wanting to wake her up, to play out the images in his dream of another life where he touched her whenever the impulse stuck.

From pushing her against the kitchen counter as he might have before, turning a gentle kiss into one with fire and passion, one that promises him the relief that he so desperately needs.

His hands linger against her skin, a soft touch, a good morning, and he wants it.

He kisses her, not a soft good morning but something more charged.

His early morning mind doing what the more rational version of him would have stopped to reconsider.

When she says his name there in the early morning air it is desperate and needy, “Leopold,” the name only she calls him. The name that reminds him that they belong to each other.

He wants this.

He wants her.

And if the way she is pressing up against him, the closest they’ve ever been despite sharing a bed for over a month now, she wants him as well.

She trembles against him like a leaf in the wind.

Soft and shaking as he runs his hands over her skin, goosebumps rising up to meet him.

A part of him, the part of him that still remembers the Framework and wants to acknowledge it, marvels at how responsive she is. The noises she makes sound so real, so genuine, as if she can’t help herself, can’t control what she’s feeling.

When his hand rubs against her thighs reaching up for her sleep shorts, she jolts against him. It sends a small thrill through him, this obvious sign that she is enjoying herself. He wants to make certain she enjoys herself.

Their eyes meet for a brief moment, he wonders what he looks like, can’t know for sure. But he can see her eyes, wide, like this is the very first time.

Like it’s -

“I never knew it would feel like this,” she says, and his hands still.

His whole body stills.

Frozen.

Like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over his head.

Because she sounds in awe and amazed and like this is the first time she’s ever had sex. It’s not. He knows it’s not, the first time was in the Framework, in her academy dorm room, when he took everything she could give him.

She’d been confused then. He had thought it funny at the time. A sort of wide eyed innocent thing.

He hadn’t known.

Not what he knows now.

Suddenly touching her seems like a privilege he does not deserve, and he pulls his hands away from her so quickly that it’s no wonder that she lets out a noise of surprise, “Leopold?”

That does nothing to help the sinking feeling in his chest.

“You couldn’t feel anything before,” he asks, and now as he says the words. He remembers standing looking out the window, before everything with SHIELD went to hell, and she had mentioned it. Still new to being human and not doing any of it right, while he still was trying to sort out two lives worth of memories.

It just hadn’t hit him at the time.

Not truly.

“I felt some things,” Ophelia insists. Still sounding confused, her brows knitting together in that look that normally he found adorable, but now only increases his guilt. Her voice is almost detached when she speaks. “I could feel pain, Radcliffe had programmed me for that much. That’s why I liked it when you were rough, at least then I could feel-”

“When I hurt you?”

She nods, “You could do it again, like we used to in the other world? I don’t mind.”

She says it so simply. Like an offer.

Anything to make him happy.

Just as she had offered herself up to him time and time again in the Framework, and for what? So that he could hurt her. Force himself upon her when she had no way to consent, because she wasn’t human, wasn’t fully in control of her body.

He thought his days of feeling like a monster were behind him.

Fewer and far between but now -

Sitting here in bed with Ophelia, her eyes wide and still confused, he feels it creeping back in. The monster that he once was.

“I need some air.”

 

*

 

He assaulted her.

That’s the truth.

Undeniable as he stands there on the beach, just close enough to the water that it brushes against his ankles as the tide comes in. He jolts each time it does, a brief hint of fear coursing through him.

A self inflicted punishment.

He deserves worse.

He deserves to keep walking into the water until it’s up around his knees. Until it’s up against his chest. Until he’s under the water and struggling to breathe, and -

“Leopold?”

It’s been hours.

He knew eventually she would come for him. She worries now. Human enough to worry about him. Though not enough to worry about herself.

He’s the one who is supposed to worry about her.

“You’re afraid of the water,” she says.

 _I’m afraid of myself_ , he doesn’t say.

Instead he agrees, "Yes."

“Come back to shore," she begs of him, "Come back home with me.”

He doesn’t deserve to.

But he can hear the pain in her voice, see the worry on her features, and hasn’t he hurt her enough.

He turns away from the water, away from the impulse to keep going out until it consumes him and goes back to her. He lets her pull him into her arms, into an embrace that he does not deserve and breathes.

And breathes.

And breathes. 

 

*

 

“Why?”

“I was built to make you happy.”

 

*

 

He insists upon sleeping on the couch for the first time in what feels like forever, because he cannot be in the same bed as her, not after this morning.

He does not trust himself.

She deserves someone better than him.

So he takes the couch. Pulls a blanket out from the closet, and tries to make himself comfortable there.

It’s not going to be comfortable.

He knows that from the week that he slept there before crossing the space between them to sleep by her side.

“Leopold?”

She lingers there in her nightgown worried still.

He hates that he’s the one that put that look there.

Hates that he can’t explain it properly.

“Will you at least tell me what I’ve done wrong,” she asks, so soft and fragile that he wants to take her into his arms, wants to tell her that she’s done nothing wrong that this is all on him, but he doesn’t.

He hangs back, outside of her space.

He sits there on the couch, and looks away from her, before his eyes start to burn with unshed tears. He won’t cry here. Not now. He’s better than that. A voice in the back of his head reminds him that crying is a weakness. He listens to that voice.

His throat is tight when he says, “Good night, Ophelia.”

 

*

 

He wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of her panicked and gasping out. Far enough away that he can't reach out beside himself to comfort her, but loud enough that he can still hear it and his heart aches in his chest.

She’s having a nightmare.

A nightmare that he’s not there to offer comfort for.

Getting off the couch, moving to where she is in bed is not an action that he can prevent. It’s something that needs to be done. She needs him. He refuses to add another wrong to the list of sins he’s committed against her.

This time he is the one to break the silence between them, holding onto her lightly, helping her calm down from the linger effects of her nightmare, “Ophelia?”

There’s tears in her eyes, he can see them in the moonlight streaming in through the window.

When she says, “Leopold,” his already aching heart seems to break open.

The desperation and surprise in her voice that is honest and genuine.

“I dreamed you left me.”

“I’d never,” he insists.

“I’m right here,” he insists.

“I’ll always be here,” he insists.

“I love you,” she says.

Still.

Again.

He can’t bring himself to say the words back.

Not yet.

But he’ll stay there in bed beside her until the sunrises, if that’s where she wants him to do.

 

*

 

The morning is different and the same.

This time she is the one that kisses him, her hands shaking against him in an attempt to keep him there with her.

He lets her kiss him.

Kisses her back, because this he thinks he can handle.

Kisses her, maybe he still deserves the privilege of kissing her.

It is when he hands move from his shoulders that he stops her by leaning away.

“I didn’t mean to push,” she says, “I’m sorry.”

When he’s the one that should be apologizing.

“Tell me what I did wrong, please, so I can fix this.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, because he needs to, “This one is on me.”

It never ceases to amaze him how perceptive she is. Even here, even now, when she’s human and real and the world is not all right there within her grasp.

Now the only thing within her grasp is him. Her fingers entwining with his to hold him in place.

“It’s because I brought up the other world,” she says, softly. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“I hurt you there, and I shouldn’t have-”

“You didn’t know.”

“Neither did you,” he insists, because he can see it now so clearly.

The first time, and the times after, she didn’t know what was going on. Hadn’t known how to feel or react.

Now that he’s felt her reacting against him, heard her genuine noises, he knows better. That, knowing, does not make this easier.

There’s fire in her eyes when they meet his. “So then, you’re going to rob me of any chance to know what this is supposed to feel like out of guilt.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Help me,” she insists. “Help me understand.”

“I don’t deserve to touch you,” he says, suddenly too loud.

She matches his tone, “I want you too.”

What results is silence.

Silence that stretches the space between them.

She breaks the silence as she always has.

Saying, his name, so desperately, that he cannot help himself.

“Leopold, please.”

Kissing her is natural, easy and familiar, as though he has been doing this for years.

He has.

In a sense.

It’s what comes after the kissing that has him hesitant. His hands shake now, unsure. Unbelieving that he is lucky enough to still have the privilege of touching this woman.

He is.

By some miracle he gets to hear her noises.

The soft breathless way she pants against his lips, the way she jolts forward at his touch, desperate for more, wanting him to much that he cannot refuse her. He touches her, slowly, softly, as she deserves. As he should have the first time, as he should have a hundred times.

She deserves to be treated like a goddess.

So he treats her like one.

He pulls her nightgown over her head and lets his hands roam her body as though he is just discovering her for the first time, catalogs each noise she makes, each time she presses against him for more. Relearning all the ways she likes to be touch, how the simplest of things can have her arching off of the bed, already shaking before he’s even gotten inside of her.

“Beautiful,” he tells her, “You’re beautiful.”

“I love you,” she says, as she always does.

And he has to bite down on his tongue and stop himself from returning the sentiment.

Now is not the time or the place.

He kisses her instead.

This is where he belongs.

Here in this bed with her.

Learning how to be himself again.

When he pulls back from her there’s tears in her eyes and he hesitates.

She catches his gaze, “These are good tears. I’m happy.”

“I’m happy too.”


End file.
